epea pteroenta

a budget of grammatical peeves

2008-05-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

A discussion I had recently online about what peevologist meant (see this Wishydig blog entry for a discussion of its origin) revealed to me a great truth about soi disant snoots: they are as lacking in their quivering aggregate of absolutist rules of “grammar” as they are in their erudition and scholarship. (Well, perhaps I’d already had an inkling of that.) Their Weltanschauung causes them to hound anybody who uses a word with a slightly different meaning to the one which their grammar teacher beat into them, e.g., decimate to mean destroy. Any whiff of semantic drift causes the customary ejaculation “And look at how gay was co-opted! It used to mean merry or joyful!” Some say it still does in some contexts. I usually try to explain to them that gay has had a long and varied semantic drift since emigrating from Normandy to England about a millennium ago.

From Partridge A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (in two volumes), Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961:

Gay. (Of women) leading an immoral, or a harlot’s, life: 1825, Westmacott (OED), In C. 20, coll., on verge of SE.—2. Slightly intoxicated; ob. C.19–20; Perhaps orig. a euphemism.—3. Impudent, impertinent, presumptious: US (—1899), anglicized in 1915 by PG Wodehouse, OED (Sup.).

Also, gay house ‘brothel’, gay in the arse ‘(Of women) loose’, to lead a gay life ‘to live immorally’, the gay instrument ‘the male member’, gaying it ‘sexual intercourse’.

The grammar mavens’ll have nothing of the sort, thankee. They’ll blink myopically and tell you that though they have nothing against homosexuals personally, but they do want their word back. Yeah, right. Why are similarly polysemous words like symbology not being ranted about? I count at least three meanings of the word: (1) The study of symbols; (2) the use of symbols; and (3) a collection or system of symbols. And don’t even ask them about mole or put.

txting the fall of the rome

2008-04-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

One of the fun things to do in museums is to try to read and decipher ancient inscriptions. Just knowing Latin or Greek is not enough, because of the extensive use of abbreviations in monumental inscriptions. Marble being an expensive material on which to write, the messages needed to be brief. Take for example, a milestone from the Via Trajana in Italy from the early second century CE. First is the original message, second is the unabbreviated version in Latin, and third is an English translation:

LXXIX
IMP CAESAR
DIVI NERVAE F
NERVA TRAIANVS
AVG GERM DACIC
PONT MAX TR POT
XIII IMP VI COS V
P P
VIAM A BENEVENTO
BRVNDISIVM PECVN
SVA FECIT

LXXIX
Imperator Caesar
divi Nervae filius
Nerva Trajanus
Augustus Germanicus Dacicus
pontifex maximus tribunitia potestate
XIII imperator VI consul V
pater patriae
viam a Benevento
Brundisium pecunia
sua fecit.

79
The emperor Caesar,
son of the deified Nerva,
Nerva Trajanus
Augustus, victor over the Germans and the Dacians,
chief priest,
holder of the tribunician power 13 times, saluted emperor 6 times, consul 5 times,
father of his country,
made the road from Beneventum
to Brindisium
at his own expense.

[From Lawrence Keppie (1991) Understanding Roman Inscriptions, pp.65-6.]

So, it occurred to me, that the Roman Empire fell, not because of lead poisoning, moral turpitude, or invading Goths and Vandals, but as a result of their language being diluted and degraded by a plague not unlike text messaging abbreviations. This also explains how the noble tongue Latin devolved into the barbarous jargons that are Italian, French, Provençal, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romantsh, and Romanian. (Published on the InterWeb earlier. And a tip of an iceberg to Professor Pullum over in the UK for posting this and jogging my memory.)

flutter by wings

2008-04-21T16:28:00.000-07:00

A while back, miladus edenensis posted on his delightful blog, Ad Usum Delphinorum, a link to an exhibit at the Bibliothèque nationale de France on Honoré Daumier and his heirs (link), one of which, Wiaz, drew the cartoon below (link). The insouciant pear is French Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, and the trenchant knife is Édouard Balladur, the Minister of Economy, Finance, and Privatization.

Not being familiar with Wiaz, I looked him up in the French Wikipedia, and, lo, his real name, Pierre Wiazemsky, made me think of Eve Democracy in Godard’s Le Vent d’est (1970, link) and Odetta in Pasolini’s Teorema (link). His sister Anne Wiazemsky was also the middle of Godard’s three wives, all of whose names begin with Ann. As if all that was not enough, the siblings Wiazemsky were the grandchildren of the daughter of Francois Mauriac (Claire) and the Prince of Wiazemsky and Count of Levachov (Yvan).

lexica supina

2008-04-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

More and more dictionaries have been showing up on my browser. Here’s a list:

John Florio. 1611. Queen Anna’s / New World / of Words, / or / Dictionarie / of Italian and English / Tongues, / Collected, and newly much augmented by / Iohn Florio, / Reader of Italian vnto the Soueraigne / Maiestie of Anna / Crowned Queene of England, Scotland, France, / and Ireland, &c. / And one of the Gentlemen of hir Royal Priuie / Chamber.
Edward Robert Tregear. 1891. Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary.
Ralph Lilley Turner. 1962–1966. A comparative dictionary of Indo-Aryan languages.
Woxikon, the Online Dictionary. German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Swedish.

bleedin pony, innit?

2008-04-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

We all know that English is going to wrack and ruin, and that the road to its destruction was paved by descriptivist linguists and skulking lexicographers. And the media are doing their part preaching to choir:

It had four wheels and cost a lot of money but, sadly for one impatient teenager, the similarity ended there.

A teenager was greeted by a display cabinet instead of a taxi because her Ali G-style slang confused a series of phone operators.

The girl hurriedly dialled directory inquiries to book a taxi from her home in London to Bristol airport, using the cockney rhyming slang Joe Baxi.

Yesterday when the “story” broke, there were along a score or so of ghits. Today, we’re up to 2,670 ghits. More blogging and bloviating. But there is some debunking is going on, too, at Five Chinese Crackers (link), Obsolete (link), and Chimp Media Monitor (link) blogs. A likely origin seems to be a press release (link).

certitudo indoctorum

2008-03-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

It’s the sort of grammatical rule that’s easy to remember: use between with two conjoined noun phrases, but among with three or more. It also has nothing to do with English grammar or usage, but that does not stop the learnèd ignorant from foisting it upon you. It is an example of the etymological fallacy. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (link) quotes J A H Murray (the first editor of the OED):

[Between] is still the only word available to express the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually, among expressing a relation to them collectively and vaguely.

The editors go on to say The OED shows citations for between used of more than two from 971 to 1885. 971 is the date the Bickling Homilies were composed (link). I took a look at the index. The entries for betweonum show that it is used four times as a postposition (probably more of a verbal particle), and a couple of times split with its complement coming between the two parts. For example:

þa cwædon þa apostolas to þæm folce, ‘Heo bið swiþor gestrangod be us tweonum þurh Drihtnes gehát’. p.143.ll.11f.

then said the Apostles to the people, ‘She shall be much more strengthened among us by God’s promise’.

In other words, pretty much since English has been written down, between has been used with more than three items.

mercutio florio

2008-03-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

Years ago, while book-grazing at the local regional library facility, I came across a curious typescript called William Shakespeare, alias Mercutio Florio. Its title page indicated the author was Friderico Georgi, but in the card catalog this was said to be a pseudonym of Franz Maximilian Saalbach. It was published in Heidelberg in 1954. Googling Franz Saalbach dredges up a Heidelberger Geschichtsverein e.V. HGV history page (link) where 17. September 1952: Gründung der HIAG-Kreisgemeinschaft Heidelberg im Bergbräu, Hauptstraße 27. Zum ersten Sprecher wird Franz Saalbach gewählt.. The German Amazon lists the book, but there the author is Erich Gerwien (link). What triggered all of this was running across a theory that Shakespeare was Italian which a couple of Sicilian professors came up with (link). And, as with anything Shakespearean, can the Oxfordists be far off? This final bit is thanks to Languagehat (link).

tiberius at capri

2008-01-06T17:42:00.001-08:00

Just read this today:

The keynote of modern pedagogy is a protest against tradition, whether in subject-matter or in methods of presentation. No subject of instruction has, when compared with other studies of the curriculum, so long a tradition behind it as has Latin. Inasmuch as every study in our modern system of education must, as is fitting, prove its ability to secure a definite result of actual worth, we shall first attempt to ascertain what credentials it needs to present to prove its right of admission as a subject of instruction.

[...]

Of this fact the writer can recall two instances, the one connected with arithmetic, the other with English grammar. His teacher in arithmetic insisted that in a case of division of fractions he must not invert the divisor and multiply, but work instead by the method of finding a greatest common divisor. The case in grammar was that complex system of “diagramming” a sentence by countless lines and sub-lines until the thing looked like a railroad map; wherein the grammatical interest of the sentence had long since yielded to its possibilities as a model in drawing. Studies and the methods employed in their elucidation must produce a definite and practical result; if their aim is mental gymnastic alone, they have no place in secondary schools. They may yield a return in dollars and cents; or they may explain the laws of nature and their relations to our bodies; or they may present the evolution of the races; or mould character, inculcate ideals, and develop a feeling for the beautiful; and the like. But some definite and practical result, bearing directly on life, each study must effect before we can admit it. The study of Latin will yield no particular financial return.

[Eugene A. Hecker. 1909. The Teaching of Latin in Secondary Schools, pp.1f.]

How refreshing to see sentence diagramming slammed in favor of studying Latin. The best way to learn grammar is to learn another language than one’s own.

comes nomen

2008-01-04T14:11:00.000-08:00

I hang out at several words-related forums online: Wordcraft, Wordsmith, Word Origins, and Wordwizard. Most of the people are united by logophilia, but they tend to clump together into two distinct and oftentimes mutually antagonistic groups: the linguists and the old-school word mavens. The latter are openly hostile to any grammatical terminology or concepts developed later than the late-18th to mid-19th centuries. You know the drill: dictionaries are lax, school children need to have grammar beaten into them (and by grammar they usually mean usage), words must have a single meaning, no neologisms, diagramming sentences should be taught in schools again, etc. I’ve been mulling this over, because recently on one of the forums, a non-native speaker of English asked a question about count nouns. The general consensus seemed to be that the term (and concept) was less than useless. The discussion degenerated further. Of course, sentence diagramming tells us absolutely nothing about why a sentence is ungrammatical.

a zed and two nods

2007-12-12T15:51:00.000-08:00

Recently I’ve been pondering something that sets some people’s teeth on edge: verbing nouns, i.e., deriving a verb from a noun, which used to be called a denominal verb and is best illustrated by the Calvin & Hobbes strip about verbing weirds the language. Anyway, I’m tired of shrill and uninformed grammar fascists pissing and moaning about the state of the language and how letting words into the dictionary from the demon Web is destroying the language. I mean if it was good enough for Shakespeare—“it out-Herods Herod (Hamlet III.ii)”—it’s grammatical enough for me. It’s not enough that these dour, so-called lovers of language are more-than-often clueless about the basics of the English language and how it works, they are hostile to linguistics as a field of study, usually without having bothered to read anything, popular or academic, whatsoever. They seem to have retained some odd sound-bites of their grammar school teachers parsing and diagramming sentences and filled in the cracks in their crackpot theories of the devolution of language at the tongues of teens, foreigners, and other unpopular kinds of folks, with illiberal, toxic doses of Strunk & White or Fowler’s Modern English Usage (first edition please and thank you). The only linguist they’ve ever heard of, not read though, is Noam Chomsky. The works of Sweet, Saussure, Bloomfield, Sapir, Jespersen, and others, are as unknown to them.

The fear of verbing nouns is due mainly to ignorance. English, for about thousand years now, has been less of an inflectional language (think Latin and all those declensions and conjugations) and more of word-order language (see Chinese for the ultimate example of this). One of the few things that most people remember from their grammar classes (really an ragbag of usage fiats and ukases posing as grammar) is parts of speech. English has a whole slew of words that it borrowed (when are they going to be returned?) from Latin and French, and those languages are more inflectional than present-day English is. So, we have groups of words like receive and reception, jeopardy and jeopardize, et al. The grammar nazis suffer from affixal envy. They crave a derivational morphology that explicitly shows a word’s lexical class on the surface. What most of them don’t realize is that there is a vast literature on the grammatical analysis of language that their grammar school teachers kept from them so their little pea brains wouldn’t explode. For example, this is what a real grammarian had to say over 80 years ago about verbing nouns:

We may imagine two extreme types of language structure in which there is always one definite formal criterion in each word-class, and one in which there are no such outward signs in any class. The nearest approach to the former state is found, not in any of our natural languages, but in an artifical language such as Esperanto or, still better, Ido, where ever common substantive ends in -o (in the plural in -i), every adjective in -a, every (derived) adverb in -e, every verb in -r, -s, or -z according to its mood. The opposite state in which there are no formal signs to show word-classes is found in Chinese, in which some words can only be used in certain applications, while others without any outward change may function now as substantives, now as verbs, now as adverbs, etc., the value in each case being shown by the syntactic rules and the context.

English here steers a middle course through the inclining more and more to thje Chinese system. Take the form round: this is a substantive in “a round of a ladder,” “he took his daily round,” and adjective in “a round table,” a verb in “he failed to round the lamp-post,”, an adverb in “come round tomorrow,”, and a preposition in “he walked round the house.” While may similarly be a substantive (he stayed here for a while), a verb (to while away time), and a conjunction (while he was away). Move may be a substantive or a verb, after a preposition, an adverb, or a conjunction, etc.

On the other hand, we have a great many words which can belong to one word-class only; admiration, society, life can only be substantives, polite only an adjective, was, comprehend only verbs, and at only a preposition.

To find out what a particular class a given word belongs to, it is generally of little avail to look at one isolated form. Nor is there any flexional ending that is the exclusive property of any single part of speech. The ending -ed (-d) is chiefly found in verbs (ended, opened, etc.), but it may also be added to substantives to form adjectives(blue-eyed, moneyed, talented, etc.). Some endings may be used as tests if we take the meaning of the ending also into account; thus if an added -s changes the word into a plural, the word is a substantive, and if it is found in the third person singular, the word is a verb; this, then, is one of the tests for keeping the substantive and the verb round apart (many rounds of the ladder; he rounds the lamp-post). In other cases the use of certain words in combinations is decisive, thus my and the in “my lover for her” and “the love I bear her” as against “I love her,” show that love is a substantive and not a verb as in the last combination (cf. my admiration, the admiration as against I admire, where admiration and admire are unambiguous.

It is, however, very important to remark that even if round and love and a great many other English words belong to more than one word-class, this is true of the isolated form only: in each separate case in which the word is used in actual speech it belongs to one class and to no other. But this is often overlooked by writers who will say that in the sentence “we tead at the vicarage” we have a case of a substantive used as a verb. The truth is that we have a real verb, just as real as dine or eat, though derived from the substantive tea—and derived without any distinctive ending in the infinitive. To form a verb from another word is not the same thing as to use a substantive as a verb, which is impossible. Dictionaries must therefore recognize love sb. and love v. as two words, and in the same way tea sb. and tea verb. In such a case as wire they should even recognize three words, (1) sb. ‘metallic thread,’ (2) ‘to send a message by wire, to telegraph’— a word formed from the first word without any derivative ending, (3) ‘message, telegram’, a sb. formed from the verb without any ending.

Otto Jespersen. 1924. The Philosophy of Grammar, pp.60ff.

And some more on prepositions and adverbs:

In nearly all grammars adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are treated as four distinct “parts of speech,” the difference between them being thus put on a par with that between substantives, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs. But in this way the dissimilarities between these words are grossly exaggerated, and their evident similarities correspondingly obscured, and I therefore propose to revert to the old terminology by which these four classes are treated as one called “particles.”

As regards form they are all invariable—apart from the power that some adverbs possess of forming comparatives and superlatives in the same manner as the adjectives to which they are related. But in order to estimate the differences in meaning or function that have led most grammarians to consider them as different parts of speech, it will be necessary to cast a glance at some words outside of these classes.

Many words are subject to a distinction which is designated by different names and therefore not perceived as essentially the same wherever found, namely that between a word complete in itself (or used for the moment as such) and one completed by some addition, generally of a restricted nature. Thus we have the complete verb in he sings, he plays, he begins; and the same verb followed by a complement in he sings a song, he plays the piano, he begins work. In this case it is usual to call the verb intransitive in one case and transitive in the other, while the complement is termed its object. [...]

If we now turn to such words as on or in, we find what is to mind an exact parallel to the instances just mentioned in their employment in combinations like “put your cap on” and “put your cap on your head”, “he was in” and “he was in the house”; yet on and in in the former sentences are termed adverbs, and in the latter prepositions, and these are reckoned as two different parts of speech. Would it not be more natural to include them in one class and to say that on and in are sometimes complete in themselves and sometimes followed by a complement (or object)? Take other examples: “he climbs up” and “he climbs up a tree,” “he falls down” and “he falls down the steps” (cf. “he ascends, or descends” with or without the complement “the steps” expressed); “he had been there before” and “he had been there before breakfast.” Is near in “it was near one o’clock” a preposition or an adverb according to the usual system. (Cf. the two synonyms almost and about, the former called an adverb, the latter a preposition.) The close correspondence between the object of a transitive verb and that of a “preposition” in seen in those cases in which a preposition is nothing but a verbal form in a special use, as for example concerning (G. betreffend) and past in “he walked past the door at half-past one,” which is simply the participle passed written in a different way; in “he walked past” it has no complement.

Ditto, pp.87ff.

baqaqi ts'qalishi qiqinebs

2007-12-01T08:19:00.000-08:00

There is a Georgian tongue-twister: ბაყაყი წყალში ყიყინებს (baqaqi ts'qalishi qiqinebs) ‘the frog in the water croaks’. (If the Georgian alphabet probably doesn’t display properly, one may download and install the BGP Classic font.) Here’s a video of an interview with Katie Melua, where she pronounces the phrase. The characters transcribed as q and ts' are a uvular ejective (stop) and alveolar ejective (affricate) respectively.

notitia dignitatum omnium tam civilium

2007-11-08T07:46:00.000-08:00

Decades ago, when I was living in self-imposed, political exile in Bonn, a friend sent me a letter. I don’t really remember anything much from the letter, except (his knowing that I was a linguaphile) a bold request for the Latin translation of the title of his then-current favorite movie, Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo. It’s the sort of thing that makes linguists shudder, but it would burn up some free hours, or, so thought I. Long story short, Cairo is a rather modern city, but the Roman legions (specifically Legio XIII Gemina) were hanging about in its general environs, and the fortress they were occupying was called Babylonia. Anyway, reminiscing about this this morning led me to discover a wonderful little corner of the Web: Dr Ingo Maier’s The Cnh or Notitia Dignitatum links site. The Notitia Dignitatum is a fifth century example of a Roman bureaucratic document: a detailed list of the offices, both civilian and military, of both halves of the Roman Empire.

feet of quine and old aside of pope

2007-11-07T08:58:00.000-08:00

As the war between the prescriptivists and the descriptivists wages wroth with no end in sight, this gnome flew in over the transom the other day (from a friend via email):

We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.

[Willard van Orman Quine Quiddities (1987) p.231.]

I hadn’t read much Pope, so the professor’s allusion was lost on me, but Google is your friend:

Expression is the dress of thought, and still
Appears more decent, as more suitable;
A vile conceit in pompous words express’d,
Is like a clown in regal purple dress’d:
For diff’rent styles with diff’rent subjects sort,
As several garbs with country, town, and court
Some by old words to fame have made pretence,
Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense;
Such labour’d nothings, in so strange a style,
Amaze th’ unlearn’d, and make the learned smile.
Unlucky, as Fungoso in the play,
These sparks with awkward vanity display
What the fine gentleman wore yesterday;
And but so mimic ancient wits at best,
As apes our grandsires, in their doublets drest.
In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:
Be not the first by whom the new are try’d,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

[Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism (1709-11) ll.318-36.]

Alike fantastic, if too new, or old: Be not the first by whom the new are try’d, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside. Words to live by, no doubt about it.

gdansk for the memories

2007-11-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

I recently found what may be the world’s first, and perhaps only, blog in the Kaszubian language. It's called Czëtnica. Kaszubian (along with Czech, Slovak, Pannonian Rusyn, Lachian, Polish, Silesian, Slovincian, Polabian, and (Upper and Lower) Sorbian) is a West Slavic language. I first learned about Kaszubian reading the Tin Drum. And, of course, there is a Kaszubian version of Wikipedia (Wikipediô).

[Addendum: It seems I was all wrong about Czëtnica. It isn’t really a blog, even though it uses WordPress software. Thanks to Mihoł for setting me straight. It’s a vortal for literature, both Kaszubian and worldwide. He suggested a couple of other Kaszubian sites, Kaszëbskô Wëdowiédnô Starna and formæ formarum. which really are blogs in spite of their using CMS software. Now I guess I have no excuse but to learn Kaszubian.]

I note that there’s a German Minority (Mniejszość Niemiecka) party in Poland. I wonder if there’s a Silesian dialect of German that’s still spoken there? There is a German-language newspaper in Silesia: Schlesisches Wochenblatt.

pars orationis

2007-10-25T13:09:00.000-07:00

The other day I received a delightful book in the post: Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences (2006) by Kitty Burns Florey. (It’s in the same humorous vein as The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed (1993) by Karen Elizabeth Gordon.) Diagramming sentences became all the craze in the States back towards the end of the 19th century owing to a book written by two fellows, Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg: Higher Lessons in English: A work on English Grammar and Composition, in Which the Science of the Language is Made Tributary to the Art of Expression: A Course of Practical Lessons Carefully Graded and Adapted to Every-day Use in the School Room (1886, revised edition 1896). Diagramming remained a stable of English grammatical pedagogy up until Chomsky sounded the death knell to structural linguistics in the late ’50s.

I noticed on her site that Ms Florey is coming to Mrs. Dallow’s bookstore in Berkeley on November 20th. I’ll have to attend her talk.

pipes all the way down

2007-10-07T07:26:00.000-07:00

Robert Sullivan has written an interesting article (“This Is Not a Bob Dylan Movie”) for the New York Times Magazine about Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan biopic (I’m Not There). Two things come immediately to mind: Velvet Goldmine (1998) and Christine Vachon. Haynes and Vachon are a major part of the New Queer Cinema, which, for a while, gave the tired, old cinema a run for its money.

Todd Haynes’s Dylan project is a biopic starring six people as Bob Dylan, or different incarnations of Bob Dylan, including a 13-year-old African-American boy, Marcus Carl Franklin, and an Australian woman, Cate Blanchett. It’s a biopic with a title that takes it name from one of the most obscure titles in the Dylan canon, a song available only as a bootleg, called I’m Not There.

Included amongst the avatars of Dylan, besides Franklin and Blanchett, are: Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw. The article makes it out to be a 20 million dollar experimental film, which I suppose is possible in a de-con, pomo sort of way. I might not even wait for the DVD of this one, but drag myself out to a matinée. I’m sure that niche in the multiplex will be close to empty. Now, if only, they could manage to keep the picture in focus.

what hath kuleshov wrought?

2007-09-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

I hadn’t known—and probably never would’ve dreamt of—it, but (thanks to the Shamus) I discover there’s a whole YouTube genre of videos of 45 RPM records spinning and music issuing thence (e.g., this Hollies tune He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother). I was immediately reminded of this scene in Eustache’s masterful La Maman et la putain (1973) of Bernadette Lafont lying and listening and weeping to Edith Piaf sing Les amants de Paris on an old stereo system.

Et pourtant, je sais bien
Que les amants de Paris
m’ont volé mes chansons.
A Paris, les amants ont de drôles de façons
[...]
J’en ai collé partout
Dans leurs calendriers
Les amants de Paris ont usé mes chansons.
A Paris, les amants s’aiment à leur façon.

monetize your buzzword

2007-09-14T05:50:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, I went to a brown bag talk (reviewed) at work. I hadn’t heard that Jakob Nielsen was going to be visiting our campus, but, after Richard told me, I looked forward to hearing from the guru of Web page usability. According to the forwarded email, Nielsen would be discussing his Alertbox column of July 9, 2007, provocatively entitled “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings”.

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

My initial reaction was what does he consider his Alertbox if not a blog? A regular (bi-weekly) column listed in reverse chronological order. It seemed to hinge on his definition of a blog as something scattered and not very well thought out. I opine; you pontificate; he bloviates. It’s a little like the poor craftsman blaming his tools. There are plenty of good, great, mediocre, and horrible blogs out there, but it’s not a blogs-generic problem. And, not many blogs are linear for that matter. That’s what folksonomic tags and cross-referential links are for.

ogmios

2007-09-10T15:48:00.001-07:00

I’ve been looking for A Primer of Irish Metrics (1909) by Kuno Meyer [1858–1919] for years. I’ve never seen it for sale on Abebooks at any price. Google Books hasn’t gotten around to digitizing it, though they advertise the one or two reprints from the ’80s. Then today I ran across a nice scan of the whole of its 62 pages at a Celtic language and lore site called The Summerlands.

rope butt

2007-09-10T14:56:00.000-07:00

More than three years ago, Languagehat had an entry on the Suidas On Line project. Suda (‘fortress’) is a huge 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedic lexicon of the Classical world. I browsed around it at the time, but had pretty much forgotten it until today, when on a logophiliac forum (Word Origins), a thread was started regarding rich people getting into heaven and camels threading through the eye of a needle (cf. Matth. XIX.24: et iterum dico vobis facilius est camelum per foramen acus transire quam divitem intrare in regnum caelorum). One of the standard interpretations (from rich hermeneuts, no doubt) is that kamēlon ‘camel’ is an error for kamilon ‘rope’. Others argue lectio difficilior lectio potior (‘the more difficult reading is the more probable one’). Others point out that a similar bit of hyperbole exists in the Talmud (Berachos 55b and Bava Metzia 38b) where it is an elephant going through the eye of a needle. (Interestingly, in the second citation, Rabbi Rava [ca.270–352 CE] asks Are you from Pumbedita, where they make an elephant pass through the eye of a needle?; Pumbedita, a center of Babylonian Talmudic scholarship, is the modern-day Fallujah.) It is interesting to note that camel is associated with the letter ג (gimel or g) in Hebrew and eye of the needle with the letter ק (qoph or q), and that the former is a voiced velar stop and that the latter is a voiceless uvular one. Least you think it’s only of concern to theology students, let me point out that kamelos occurs in Aristophanes’ The Wasps (l.1035) where one reads of prōkton de kamēlou (‘the arse of a camel’), besides the stench of a seal and the unwashed balls of a Lamia.

turkalsa

2007-09-05T05:41:00.000-07:00

While contemplating the conlanging ruckus over at Omniglot, The Blog, I paused for a moment to reflect on La Verda Stelo’s older sister, Volapük. I have been browsing the non-anglophone versions of Wikipedia, and was delighted to find the Vükiped, which is in the same category as Czech, Slovak, or Esperanto: i.e., over 10K entries. And not just little one liners, e.g., have a look-see at the entry on Mata Hari. Somebody seemingly went to some trouble to translate the English entry. (Though I am pretty sure that Volakrig Balid means World War One.) The entry on Esperanto is pointedly short. I have a poor xerox of a Volapük grammar somewhere in the garage, but who needs that with the Web at one’s fingertips? What always struck me about this language, was how utterly foreign it looks. Esperanto seems like a Welcome to Side Six kind of friendly mishmash of Romance with some odd Germanic or Slavic roots thrown in for good measure. (On further inspection, most articles seem to be the work of one person.)

lutakujababot oba binon fulik senkafitas

2007-09-04T19:36:00.000-07:00

I don’t know how I got this far in life without having heard of English As She Is Spoke. Suddenly why Little Johnny can’t speak Portuguese and all those hovercrafts full of eels make so much more sense. Vade mecum.

di tsvey kuni-lemels

2007-09-02T09:13:00.000-07:00

Last week, my friends, Jenny and Cliff, invited me over to watch an Israeli documentary The Komediant about the Burstein family of Yiddish entertainers: Pesach [1896–1986], his wife Lillian Lux [1918–2005], and their twin children Mike Burstyn and Susan Burstein-Roth [1945– ]. It was fun, and upon arriving home that evening I’d read through the film’s website and the relevant Wikipedia articles. Seeing that an autobiography had been written in 1980 in Yiddish, I pointed Firefox at Henry Hollander’s online bookstore and ordered a copy of geshpilt a lebn (What a Life!). It arrived yesterday, and I immediately noticed two things: the tipped-in photos of Pesachke and Lilian, and the inscription to the book’s previous owner, Freydele Oysher [1913–2004]. What fun! Now if I could just find a copy of Shnei Kuni Lemel to viddy well I’d be happy.

coinkydinkies tween the blogosphere and meatspace

2007-08-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

A while back, via the intertwingularity that is the very webbic essence of the blogosphere (probably, no doubt, via my good blogging buddy, Mr BaliHai of Eye of the Goof) I discovered Karl Esklund’s late-WW2 mémoir, My Chinese Wife. I saw a scan of the dust jacket, vide infra, which grabbed me by the lapels and said: go thou to Abebooks and buy this book, wait, and read it. Which I did. Had been waiting. After which I have done.

Karl Esklund [1918–1972] leaves Denmark as a young man and travels to Shanghai where his dad is working as a dentist. He decides to make a living as a journalist, and soon falls for a Chinese woman, Fei Chi-yun [1918–2002], and woos and weds her, much to the chagrin of his father and hers. Adventures include getting out of war-torn Europe, trying to live in Chongqing [then known as Chungking], Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime capital of China. The story ends with Karl and Chi-yun going to Mexico via San Francisco with their newborn girl Mei-mei. The latter seems to have been a model for a Playboy newstand special The Girls of Playboy 2 (1974).

mind you, literally literal-minded

2007-08-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

The blogoshphere just got a little smaller. Today I was going through my blogroll and—long story short—I noticed that there are two language blogs out there with the same name (Literal-Minded) and the same sub-title (linguistic commentary from a guy who takes things too literally). One is hosted on Blogger and ~~run by a guy name Mack~~ is a spam blog ~~and~~ that ripped off the IP of the other one which is hosted on WordPress and run by a guy named Neal Whitman. Neal also has another website called Literal-Minded Linguistics. The former has been online since June 14, 2007, and the latter since January 18, 2004.

[Addendum: Neal noticed this entry and was kind enough to explain in the commentary what’s up.]